Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Aesthetic attitude

« there are some features that everyone with normal eyes, ears and intelligence perceives - shape or loudness, forexample.

But there are also features that are perceived only by people with a special sensitivity - balance or unity,for example.

These latter people are the ones who have taste.

If a vase is gracefully curved, either one sees thegracefulness or one does not.

Sibley believes that this explains why aesthetic concepts are not condition-governed.That is, no list of non-aesthetic features (those perceivable by everyone) is logically sufficient for deducing that anobject or event has any particular aesthetic features (those perceivable only by people with taste).

Told that avase is pink, made of glass, and fifty centimetres high, one is unable to conclude that the vase must be gracefullycurved.

And this is true, Sibley argues, no matter how long a list of non-aesthetic properties is provided.

None theless, Sibley argues, aesthetic concepts are objective; that is, ‘The vase is gracefully curved' is either true or false.In this respect, aesthetic concepts are like colour concepts.

Only people with adequate colour vision can seepinkness, but nevertheless we believe that the sentence, ‘The vase is pink,' is either true or false.

This is becausepeople with normal colour vision agree about it.

With respect to aesthetic concepts, agreement also provides thefoundation of objectivity.

People of taste agree that the vase is gracefully curved, and this is all we need tosupport the claim that aesthetic judgments have truth values.

Sibley's view combines psychological, logical,epistemological and metaphysical components, and it has been criticized in all of these fields.

It is often objectedthat ‘taste' is a very unclear notion - certainly not adequate to support a unique logic of aesthetic concepts.

Nor isit so easy to distinguish aesthetic from non-aesthetic properties (and hence the corresponding concepts).

Andmany writers have argued that the analogy of aesthetic and colour concepts does not really support the sought-forobjectivity of the former; there is nothing like the widespread agreement that can be found for non-aestheticqualities (on the assumption that they can be distinguished from aesthetic qualities) in the aesthetic realm.Disagreement among recognized experts in discussions of works of art is notorious.

None the less, many theoristsagree with Sibley that there is something special about aesthetic concepts and that there are no ‘aesthetic laws',that is, that there is no way of defining an aesthetic concept in terms of non-aesthetic concepts.

IsabelHungerland ( 1968 ) has described a distinction that she believes marks non-aesthetic concepts from aesthetic concepts: a seeming/being distinction.

One can say that a person looks (seems) healthy but is not healthy, or thata house looks pink but is not pink.

But this difference is absent in aesthetic attributions, she believes.

If a vaselooks gracefully curved, it is gracefully curved; if a voice sounds sweet, it is sweet.

Peter Kivy has objected to thisway of distinguishing aesthetic from non-aesthetic concepts ( 1968 ).

‘Unified', he argues, is surely an aesthetic concept; but it fails Hungerland's seeming/being test.

A symphony may seem unified but may not really be unified.Kivy is also sceptical that there are no aesthetic concepts that can be reduced to non-aesthetic concepts.

A veryfull description of a piece of music in non-aesthetic terms may lead one to conclude that the piece is unified.

Thusthere does not seem to be, for Kivy and others, a definitive way to distinguish aesthetic from non-aestheticconcepts.

3 Recent attempts to establish aesthetic realism The view that there are no aesthetic laws connecting aesthetic and non-aesthetic concepts remains prevalent.

Mary Mothersill, for example, argues thatthere are no principles or laws of taste and that everyone admits this when pressed ( 1984 ).

None the less, aesthetic judgments are genuine judgments, that is, they have truth values and play a role in inference.

They areopen to serious question and debate (unlike, say, judgments about whether raw oysters taste good).

They can beconfirmed or disconfirmed by pointing to features of an object or event that are believed to cause pleasure, not justin the individual making the judgment but in other individuals who similarly investigate the object or event.Discussions that include aesthetic concepts are undertaken with the same hope of eventual agreement amongpersons of normal intelligence and interest as are discussions about many non-aesthetic concepts.

There may be noreason to expect, as Kant believed, that everyone ought to find the same things beautiful; none the less we doexpect that when we point to features or objects or events that we find beautiful, at least like-minded individualswill concur, according to Mothersill.

Another way theorists have tried to establish aesthetic realism is by arguingthat aesthetic concepts connect to objective features of the world via a relationship known as ‘supervenience' (seeSupervenience ).

Even if aesthetic concepts may not be definable in terms of non-aesthetic concepts, if one can establish that the properties associated with these aesthetic concepts supervene on physical properties that existin the world, then there is a foundation for the objectivity of aesthetic judgments.

Philosophers have characterizedsupervenience in various ways; however, the important feature they all try to capture is the connection between astable set of base properties and some property that seems to depend upon them, even though that dependencecannot be captured via a strict definition.

It is possible to imagine two houses that share all base properties exceptthat one house is yellow, the other not.

‘Yellow' is not supervenient.

But if both houses share all base propertiesthen it is not possible for one to be beautiful, the other not beautiful.

‘Beauty' is supervenient.

As long as the baseproperties are stable and the meaning of ‘beauty' remains the same, then it will be either true or false that anythingwith those base properties is beautiful.

Thus a vase's graceful curves cannot be defined in terms of its angles, size,colour, material, and so forth, but its gracefulness does depend upon the particular physical properties that itpossesses.

If all the physical properties stay the same, so will all of its aesthetic properties, in this view.

Thusaesthetic concepts are connected to the real world, and individual attributions of an aesthetic term can beexplained or justified in terms of ‘real world' properties.

But not everyone agrees that aesthetic concepts areilluminated via the notion of supervenience.

For one thing, it is difficult to specify clearly what counts as a baseproperty.

Sibley, for example, thinks that colour is not an aesthetic property (for anyone with ordinary perceptivepowers can see the colour of an object); others think that colour is obviously an aesthetic property.

Furthermore,an essential assumption is that the meaning of ‘beauty' be stable - and this is an assumption that has beenseriously questioned.

A building considered beautiful in one culture may not be considered beautiful elsewhere.

Thusit appears that beauty is not supervenient, for it is possible for two houses to have all the same properties exceptthat one is beautiful, the other not beautiful.

4 Aesthetic concepts as contextual constructs If taste or some similar universal human propensity to have certain sorts of experiences in the presence of some objects or events isthe foundation of aesthetic concepts, then one would expect that all people (at least all who share a certaindegree of sensitivity) will form similar concepts.

Beauty and ugliness, for example, should be concepts formed and. »